Use of complementary and alternative medicine in cancer patients: a European survey

Background: The aim of this study was to explore the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in cancer patients across a number of European countries. Methods: A descriptive survey design was developed. Fourteen countries participated in the study and data was collected through a descriptive questionnaire from 956 patients. Results: Data suggest that CAM is popular among cancer patients with 35.9% using some form of CAM (range among countries 14.8% to 73.1%). A heterogeneous group of 58 therapies were identified as being used. Herbal medicines and remedies were the most commonly used CAM therapies, together with homeopathy, vitamins/minerals, medicinal teas, spiritual therapies and relaxation techniques. Herbal medicine use tripled from use before diagnosis to use since diagnosis with cancer. Multivariate analysis suggested that the profile of the CAM user was that of younger people, female and with higher educational level. The source of information was mainly from friends/family and the media, while physicians and nurses played a small part in providing CAM-related information. The majority used CAM to increase the body's ability to fight cancer or improve physical and emotional well-being, and many seemed to have benefited from using CAM (even though the benefits were not necessarily related to the initial reason for using CAM). Some 4.4% of patients, however, reported side-effects, mostly transient. Conclusions: It is imperative that health professionals explore the use of CAM with their cancer patients, educate them about potentially beneficial therapies in light of the limited available evidence of effectiveness, and work towards an integrated model of health-care provisio

The effect of high strain rate deformation on intermetallic reaction during ultrasonic welding aluminium to magnesium

High power ultrasonic spot welding (USW) is a low heat input solid-state joining process that may offer a solution for welding difficult dissimilar-material couples, like magnesium (Mg) to aluminium (Al) for automotive body applications. However, the high strain rate dynamic deformation in USW has been claimed to accelerate inter-diffusion rates in dissimilar joints. The interfacial reaction between Al, AA6111, and Mg AZ31 alloys has been studied as a function of welding energy. For the optimum welding condition of 600 J (0.4 s) the reaction layer thickness was already ∼5 μm thick. Intermetallic reaction centres were found to nucleate within microwelds at the interface at very short welding times and spread and grow rapidly to form a continuous layer, composed of two sub-layers of Al12Mg17 and Al3Mg2. Interface liquation was also found for longer welding times at temperatures below the recognised lowest eutectic reaction temperature in the Al–Mg binary system. Modelling has been used to show that the solid state reaction kinetics were over twice the rate expected from parabolic growth predictions made using rate constants obtained under static test conditions. The reasons for this discrepancy and the depressed melting reaction are discussed

Siamese Tracking of Cell Behaviour Patterns

Tracking and segmentation of biological cells in video sequences is a challenging problem, especially due to the similarity of the cells and high levels of inherent noise. Most machine learning-based approaches lack robustness and suffer from sensitivity to less prominent events such as mitosis, apoptosis and cell collisions. Due to the large variance in medical image characteristics, most approaches are dataset-specific and do not generalise well on other datasets. In this paper, we propose a simple end-to-end cascade neural architecture that can effectively model the movement behaviour of biological cells and predict collision and mitosis events. Our approach uses U-Net for an initial segmentation which is then improved through processing by a siamese tracker capable of matching each cell along the temporal axis. By facilitating the re-segmentation of collided and mitotic cells, our method demonstrates its capability to handle volatile trajectories and unpredictable cell locations while being invariant to cell morphology. We demonstrate that our tracking approach achieves state-of-the-art results on PhC-C2DL-PSC and Fluo-N2DH-SIM+ datasets and ranks second on the DIC-C2DH-HeLa dataset of the cell tracking challenge benchmarks

A computational study on outliers in world music

The comparative analysis of world music cultures has been the focus of several ethnomusicological studies in the last century. With the advances of Music Information Retrieval and the increased accessibility of sound archives, large-scale analysis of world music with computational tools is today feasible. We investigate music similarity in a corpus of 8200 recordings of folk and traditional music from 137 countries around the world. In particular, we aim to identify music recordings that are most distinct compared to the rest of our corpus. We refer to these recordings as ‘outliers’. We use signal processing tools to extract music information from audio recordings, data mining to quantify similarity and detect outliers, and spatial statistics to account for geographical correlation. Our findings suggest that Botswana is the country with the most distinct recordings in the corpus and China is the country with the most distinct recordings when considering spatial correlation. Our analysis includes a comparison of musical attributes and styles that contribute to the ‘uniqueness’ of the music of each country

The role of peptides in bone healing and regeneration: A systematic review

Background: Bone tissue engineering and the research surrounding peptides has expanded significantly over the last few decades. Several peptides have been shown to support and stimulate the bone healing response and have been proposed as therapeutic vehicles for clinical use. The aim of this comprehensive review is to present the clinical and experimental studies analysing the potential role of peptides for bone healing and bone regeneration. Methods: A systematic review according to PRISMA guidelines was conducted. Articles presenting peptides capable of exerting an upregulatory effect on osteoprogenitor cells and bone healing were included in the study. Results: Based on the available literature, a significant amount of experimental in vitro and in vivo evidence exists. Several peptides were found to upregulate the bone healing response in experimental models and could act as potential candidates for future clinical applications. However, from the available peptides that reached the level of clinical trials, the presented results are limited. Conclusion: Further research is desirable to shed more light into the processes governing the osteoprogenitor cellular responses. With further advances in the field of biomimetic materials and scaffolds, new treatment modalities for bone repair will emerge

Overview of BIM integration into the Construction Sector in European Member States and European Union Acquis

The amount of information involved in any construction project and the necessity of control of time, cost and waste, has established Building Information Modelling (BIM) as an integral part of construction sector towards achieving adequate communication of information among various parties involved in construction projects. Moreover, it can be considered as a valuable tool for the optimum selection of materials, systems and design decisions, regarding not only the improve of a structure’s performance, but also in terms of reducing its carbon footprint during its life cycle. The study attempts to present the integration of BIM into the national legislation of European Member States, with a special focus on the energy related aspects of BIM analysis. This study performs an overview of the introduction of BIM into different aspects and requirements of the EU Member States building practices, through a comprehensive literature and legislation review of relative legislative documents of the construction sector. According to the findings of this overview study, the concept of BIM has already been incorporated in many aspects of the Acquis of EU Member States, which is recognized as a valuable tool to be exploited by the construction sector, however there is still room for development in this area. The study has revealed that especially in the energy assessment of the built environment, BIM applications are still lacking from the European Legislation. Examples and good practices of employing BIM for the implementation of the European Energy targets in the building sector are also presented and discussed. The findings of this study aim to shed light on the needs and requirements in the field of BIM development for the construction sector, as well as to indicate gaps and weaknesses of the European Member States Acquis towards harmonizing with BIM practices